Dreaming of Tomorrow
by AngelicTrinity
Summary: Fem!Nightmare. Aislinn wanted nothing to do with the Bloody Valentine conflict. She equally despised the Earth Alliance's racism towards Coordinators and the Coordinators' arrogant supremacy when it came to their genetic enhancements. But how can there be peace if two sides are out to eliminate each other entirely? Unfortunately the more one resists, the harder they are drawn in.


**I honestly have no idea where this idea came from. I seriously don't. But the idea was seriously annoying me until I got onto my laptop and started typing it out. Took me a couple of re-writes and a whole lot of editing, but I finally managed to get out the first chapter. This doesn't cover the entire first episode, but that's because it builds up on the civilian life of two of our protagonists.**

 **Anything regarding the plot will be elaborated more on in further chapters. This is just the introduction... no need to throw everything else in your face.**

 **Disclaimer: I do not own Gundam Seed or any of the HNKNA series. They belong to Sunrise and Quinrose respectively. I do, however, own the concept of Aislinn who is a genderbent Nightmare. So fem!Nightmare.**

* * *

 **Chapter One**

"Aislinn, wake up!"

If whoever was trying to wake her up didn't let go of her shoulder soon, she was going to bite their hand off. Hard.

"Aislinn!"

The girl in question let out a long groan at the fact that there was no way she was going to be catching up on her sleep any more. Not with whoever was shaking her awake determined to bring her back to the realm of consciousness. Slowly forcing her eyes open, she realized that she was lying face down on the keyboard of her laptop. With another sigh of disgust directed at the fact that she had probably fallen asleep in the _middle of something again,_ Aislinn lifted her head off the keyboard while tucking strands of her silver hair behind her ear. Barely awake and far from functioning at full mental capacity, she looked around while blinking the sleep out of her eyes, trying to figure out where she had passed out again.

A quick sweep at her surroundings told her she was sitting in one of the college campus gazebos. Judging by the spread of papers and her open laptop, she had definitely been working on something before suddenly passing out.

Finally her gaze landed on a boy around her age with brown hair and violet eyes who was staring back at her, an expression of exasperation and concern on his face. It was Kira Yamato. Her childhood friend, classmate, and fellow assistant.

"Aislinn, you're supposed to be helping me! Professor Kato said this was due today!"

Though she was still half asleep, Aislinn couldn't help but roll her eyes at the sound of the nasally (and slightly whiny) tone of voice that the boy was addressing her with.

"Sorry Kira," She lifted up a hand to her mouth as she yawned. "Must have passed out again. How long have I been asleep?"

"Uh..." The boy looked down at his own laptop to check the time. "Maybe fifteen to twenty minutes?"

Aislinn yawned again and stretched her arms up into the air to get rid of the stiffness that settled in during her impromptu nap. "Not too bad then. Anyways, I'm almost finished up on my end so don't burst a blood vessel over it."

Seeing Kira still staring at her, the silver haired girl lowered her arms and stared back right at him. "What?"

"Are you okay?" He asked. "You're kinda pale. And I've noticed that you've been sleeping in class sometimes and during breaks."

"I'm fine." Aislinn said. She knew where this was going and she _really_ didn't want to get into it.

But the look on Kira's face told her that he wasn't going to drop it. As gentle as he was most of the time, he had a stubborn streak as well, especially when it came to the well-being of his friends. Particularly when it came to Aislinn. The two of them had known each long enough to be able to discern when the other was lying.

"Really?" His tone of voice suggested that he didn't believe her at all.

"Ye-es." Aislinn frowned. "What are you getting at?"

"Only that the last several times you said you were 'fine', you either ended up collapsing or sitting on the sidelines dealing with a coughing fit." He pointed out. "You're always unnecessarily pushing yourself when it comes to... practically everything. We aren't at the academy any more; you should take it easy."

Aislinn snorted, opening up the document that she had been working on earlier. "If I took it easy whenever you told me to, that would be leaving you with the majority of work to do."

"I don't mind. It's not like you're skipping out on purpose."

"Well _I_ mind." Aislinn's voice had a tone of finality it as she began focusing on the remaining work she had to do. "Like you said, Professor Kato said this was due today. And this is _Professor Kato_ we're talking about."

The emphasis that she placed on the professor's title and name made Kira groan and Aislinn couldn't help the vindictive smirk that appeared on her lips.

Professor Kato was the Head of the Robots and Engineering program at the college and was quite infamous within the campus. He was brilliant and deserving of his title as the head of his department, but he had a bad habit of taking on more than he could handle. In turn, this lead to him shafting most of the projects he started or took on onto the poor student who had the misfortune of being his assistant at the time.

His latest stint was working for the weapons company Morgonroete and the unfortunate shmucks taking the brunt of the work were Aislinn and Kira.

The man was infamous for going through his student assistants' liked used tissue. The reason for that was because he had a horrendous habit of dropping sudden projects on their laps with incredibly short deadlines. He paid good money, but most people found that the amount of work he wanted done in a short period of time was not worth the cash.

Prior to Kira signing up as his student assistant, Professor Kato had been so desperate for an assistant to help him out with his work that he was willing to pay four times the amount of money to _anyone_ who would help. Apparently he had wept tears of joy when Kira went up to him asking for the open position as his assistant before dumping all the work that had been piling up on his desk because of his lack of paid help during the past month.

"Yeah, I know." Kira say tiredly. "Knowing him, we're going to have more work dumped on us the minute we finish this."

"Maybe if we weren't so efficient when it came to picking up the slack for him, we wouldn't be in this mess in the first place." Aislinn rubbed at her eyes as she quickened the pace of her typing. But not fast enough to warrant unwanted attention from the people around them. If she was working in an open area where other people could see her, she slowed down her typing speed despite how much time it cost her.

Aislinn came into the picture as the second assistant when Kira started slacking off on his other classes because of the sheer volume of work the Head of the Department kept piling on to him. Professor Kato at least had the decency to realize that maybe he was working his assistant too hard and hired a second one to help out as well. Kira protested at first when he realized that Aislinn was the second assistant, stating that being Professor Kato's assistant was beyond stressful. Eventually he had to admit that her being the second assistant had definitely helped him out.

Even if half the time she had to take a rain check because her health took a turn for the worse and she could barely get out of bed.

But Aislinn was always up for a challenge. And what better challenge than being the Head of the Robotic and Engineering Department's assistant?

Though ever since Kira became the Professor's assistant, followed by Aislinn, he had developed a bad habit of giving them more work to do when they hadn't even completed the previous task he gave them before hand. The latter suspected that because they were getting more things done than his previous assistants, the good professor took that as a sign to pile tasks on to them.

Oh well. No point in complaining about it now.

* * *

Aislinn had no idea how much time had passed, but eventually she finished up her half of Kato's assignments. Something she made blatantly obvious by shoving her laptop none to carefully to the side before holding her arms on the gazebo table and resting her head on them.

"Seriously?" Kira complained by her right.

"I worked on most of it last night until Vivaldi came home and told me to go to bed."

Which had been at one am in the morning. Aislinn had woken up at six am and after getting a coffee to chug down and keep her awake for the next few hours, she had resumed working on what her employer wanted done. She only headed to the gazebo when Kira called her up and asked if she wanted to go over their work together.

"How long were you up?"

"Until eleven." Was Aislinn's immediate reply. Seeing her friend's critical look, she said, "What?"

"No really," He said again. "What time were you up until last night?"

Aislinn rolled her eyes and 'tsked'. Kira knew her far too well to take her at face value whenever it came to her health. "Fine. One. I was up until one am and I woke up at exactly six this morning."

"Aislinn!" Kira groaned in exasperation.

"I've been busy with not only Professor Kato's stuff, but other projects too!" She said defensively. "If I want to make the deadlines, then some sacrifices have to be made."

Kira opened his mouth, as if to protest, before clamping it shut again with a deep sigh and turning back to his own unfinished work.

"If you pass out again, you have no one but yourself to blame." He muttered.

"Who said I blamed anyone?"

Silence fell over them as Kira refocused on his work and Aislinn tried to catch up on her sleep again. Ten minutes later she conceded, unfortunately, that she wasn't going back to sleep any time soon. With a grumble, she began surfing the web, trying to find something to pass the time. Or at least she tried to. It was kind of hard to focus on her own thing when the guy next to her was listening to a live news report on top of typing out what was written on the note pad he was holding.

Straining her hearing, Aislinn picked up from the news channel that South America was undergoing a supply crisis that was putting 1.2 million refugees at risk and that the city of Kaohsiung was under siege by ZAFT.

At that moment a robotic green bird perched itself on top of Kira's computer. It was Tori, Kira's constant mechanical companion. It made a chirping noise that finally made its owner look up.

"What are you watching?" Her curiosity finally got the better of her and she got on her hands and knees to crawl over. While she could hear the news channel from where she was, she was more of a visual person than a listener.

"Hey- Aislinn!" Kira let out a startled exclamation as she completely invaded his personal space. "I'm trying to work here!"

"On top of watching the news report?"

Kira paused. "It's... you know it isn't all that hard for us to multitask on three to four things- much less two."

Aislinn knew what he meant by that. But before she could comment on that, she heard a familiar voice calling out her and Kira's names.

"Kira!" The voice called out again. "Aislinn!"

The two student assistants' looked up at the same time to see a boy around their age with wavy brown hair and green eyes walking towards them. He was dressed in a mint green shirt that matched the colour of his eyes and black jeans. Accompanying him was a girl with light brown hair and bright blue eyes decked out in an orange dress with matching sleeveless gloves that came up to her shoulders.

It was Tolle Koenig and his girlfriend Mirellia Haw. They were Aislinn and Kira's other friends and classmates. Or to put it more accurately they were Kira's friends first and Aislinn befriended them after he and Aislinn saw each other for the first time in years in Heliopolis of all places.

There was a huge grin plastered on Tolle's face as he looked between the two of them. "I suspected that the two of you were close, but not _that_ close. Getting cozy, are we?"

Aislinn stared at Tolle, a question forming on her lips to ask what he meant by that when she felt Kira shift next to her and suddenly found herself falling underneath the gazebo table with a loud thud.

"...Ow..."

"Ack!" That was Kira. "Aislinn! I'm sorry! Are you alright?"

"I'm fine." Aislinn groaned. Taking Kira's hand, she climbed out from underneath the table and sat up on the bench again. "Just bruised."

"Anyways," There was a huge grin plastered on Tolle's face as he waggled his eyebrows at them suggestively. "We were looking for you. Professor Kato wanted to see you both and ordered us to bring you over once we found you."

Kira and Aislinn let out a simultaneous groan at Tolle's announcement. While they had anticipated this, Professor Kato asking for them pretty much confirmed it.

"I just _finished_ the work he gave me not even fifteen minutes ago!" Aislinn dropped her head onto the table with a dramatic bang. "Give us a break!"

"I'm not even done yet!" Kira fell back against the gazebo, dropping the note pad he had been holding with a sigh. "I was hoping that he would at least give us a little time off for today!"

"This is Professor Kato, remember?" Aislinn grumbled, her voice muffled by the surface of the table. "The man infamous for springing sudden projects on his poor unsuspecting aids."

Tolle threw back his head and laughed while Miriallia giggled at the downtrodden looks the two were sporting. "Well, it's your fault for signing up to be his assistants." Miriallia said once she could talk again. "You both knew of his reputation beforehand."

"Yeah." Tolle wiped tears of mirth from his eyes. "And the two of you are his longest staying assistants I've heard of. I bet he's just happy to not have to worry about either of you quitting out of nowhere."

"I'm thinking of quitting if he doesn't knock it off with the projects." Aislinn rolled her eyes. "Seriously. We're not super human."

"No," Miriallia said sympathetically. "But sometimes I have to wonder..."

But before that topic could be pursued any further, screaming blared from Kira's laptop. It wasn't loud, but it definitely got their attention and distracted the newcomers to the gazebo.

 _"-it's begun! Hurry! Hurry! Run away! That way's just as dangerous!"_

"Breaking news?" Tolle asked as he came around the table to get a better look at the screen.

"Yeah." Kira enlarged the news channel that was showing off a bunch of giant robots in the background terrorizing the city. "Kaosiung, apparently."

"Last week's news, judging by the date I saw earlier." Aislinn threw in her input.

 _"Here, about seven miles from Kaohsiung the sounds of severe battle continue to echo."_

"If these are scenes from last week they may have already taken over Kaohsiung already." Tolle looked impressed despite the fact that there were giant robots wrecking the city.

Miriallia had come over to Kira's other side as well to watch the news. But unlike her boyfriend, she looked worried.

Kira touched the top of his laptop and the screen blanked out as he turned off the computer. No doubt because he didn't want to watch the depressing live report any longer.

"Kaohsiung isn't that far away, is it? Will the Homeland be alright?" Miriallia asked, her face twisted in concern.

Aislinn opened her mouth to speak, but clamped it shut again at the look that Kira was giving her. Truth be told, she thought it would only be a matter of time before the Homeland got caught up in the fighting. Outside of the Homeland and any other nations that claimed to be on neither side of the conflict between the Earth Alliance and ZAFT, no one was happy with the nation's neutral stance in the current war. Either because the Earth Alliance claimed that if they lived on Earth then they should _obviously_ ally themselves with the EA or because ZAFT deemed them as too big of a threat and decided to take them out regardless of their stance in neutrality.

"Sure, there's no need to worry." Tolle assured his girlfriend. "Although they're close, we're a neutral entity."

Aislinn wanted to believe that. She really did. But the way things were going... it was probably a matter of time before the whole damned world was embroiled in conflict regardless of whether a nation was pro-Alliance, pro-ZAFT or neutral.

Things often tended to get worse before they got better.

* * *

 **And thus concludes Chapter One. As you should know by now, Aislinn is a genderbent Nightmare. But just because she's a female version of him doesn't necessarily mean she is going to be a female doppleganger of the original guy. She shares traits with him, but at the same time she is going to be different from him in her approach to situations that are thrown at her. And personality... somewhat.**

 **So please review and tell me what you think!**

 **And here's a fun question for you guys: How many VAs do Gundam Seed and the HNKNA series share and who are they? Don't forget to name the characters they voice in both series!**


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